THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black
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here are some highlights:No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution.
...The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival.
...Like the surrealists ... I favor full unemployment.
...I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
...Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.
...But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential.
...Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible.
...Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic.
...You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.
...Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.
...Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work
is for saps!"
...The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health."
...At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand ... we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes.
...Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
...If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation.
...Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now -- a zero-sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
File no. 0521 -- APR 1989 -- Derek Brownlee